Rachel was a shepherdess. When Jacob first saw her coming with her father's sheep, he rolled the stone from the well, watered her flock, kissed her and wept. He served seven years for her, “and they seemed only a few days to him because of the love he had for her.” Rachel had what her sister Leah longed for — her husband's love. Yet Rachel had her own deep ache.
“Now when Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister.” She said to Jacob, “Give me children, or else I die!” Jacob answered in anger, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” Each sister wanted what the other had: Leah wanted love, and Rachel wanted children. Envy is the pain of looking at someone else's blessing and feeling robbed.
Rachel repeated Sarah's mistake and gave her maid Bilhah to Jacob. When Bilhah's second son was born, Rachel named him Naphtali, saying, “With great wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, and indeed I have prevailed.” The sisters even bargained over mandrakes, a plant people believed helped a woman conceive. But children did not come from mandrakes or rivalry. They came from God.
“Then God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb.” She bore a son and said, “God has taken away my reproach,” and she named him Joseph, saying, “The LORD shall add to me another son.” Joseph would one day save the whole family. Yet Rachel's story has shadows too: when Jacob's family fled from Laban, she secretly stole her father's household idols and hid them by sitting on them. Old attachments are not always left behind easily.
Rachel's longing for another son was answered at great cost. On the road to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem, she died in hard labor. With her last breath she named the boy Ben-Oni, son of my sorrow, but Jacob called him Benjamin, son of the right hand. Jacob set a pillar on her grave. Centuries later Jeremiah heard “Rachel weeping for her children,” and Matthew quoted that verse when Herod killed the children of Bethlehem. But Jeremiah's next words are hope: “Refrain your voice from weeping… they shall come back from the land of the enemy.”